Start Small and Harvest Your Mistakes and Successes

Reader Contribution by Charlyn Ellis
Published on June 9, 2015
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Although I raised vegetables in my mother’s back yard through high school and several years of college, planting it all one evening in late April and coming back, a month later, for the summer growing season, my first real garden was three washtubs, spray-painted yellow, blue, and red, on my back patio in Boston, Massachusetts. I was in graduate school, without a yard, and too old to travel home weekends to tend my old patch, which was growing up in mint. I planted a cucumber in one tub, marigolds in the second, and a cherry tomato in the third. The tomato was for my boyfriend—I did not like tomatoes. I mean, who would—hard pink things with no flavor that they were. They added color to an iceburg lettuce salad, but nothing else. All three crops grew beautifully in the warm protected space.

I remember that patio tomato regularly when I walk into my lush backyard to survey the gardens and when I dream, occasionally, about moving out of town onto our own forty acre farm, complete with orchard and goats and a big dog. Maybe we will, but I really doubt it. We like walking to the library and grocery store too much to leave our little house in town. And not everybody can live in the country—but everyone can bring some of that country, that producing your own food, setting yourself up for the winter, reducing your dependence on outside forces dream to wherever they live right now.

Start Small

• Shop at the Farmer’s Market. Learn four recipes for the uncommon vegetables, like winter squash, kale and chard, fennel, and parsnips.

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